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I don’t feel that intellectual outsourcing is about exploiting developing countries for cheap labour (as oppose to this being the case for physical labour; stereotypically for shoe factories). It’s cheap pay for either low-skills at market rate, or cheap pay for poor quality “high-skills”. There are high quality high-skill software developers in all of those countries — they migrate to where the high paying jobs are (or start their own companies in their home countries). It doesn’t seem like anyone is selling themselves short to get the jobs. It’s just that in today’s global economy, a failing company/department/project could make that final leap for the cheap options rather than folding right away. As I see it, those jobs would have been lost regardless of the outsource option being available or not.

There is this perception that a typical programming job involves being locked away in a grey cubicle at some LargeCorp Inc., buried in mediocre tasks, and rarely seeing the light of day. While this grim illustration is not exactly the case, there is some motive to such stereotype.

So we’ll be going on an adventure through on-site programming positions that are anything but typical.

I’m often asked about available jobs for Computer Science students. More so in light of the recent economic downturn. A new trend that I’m observing, since 2 years ago, is that there is a substantial increase of job postings from much smaller start-up companies.

Economic hardship breeds innovation. It puts large corporations into a compromised position, and that opens up an opportunity for small, agile, smart, inexpensive, but super-productive startups to come into play and compete with established corporations.